GA – Universal Analytics
Universal Analytics refers to the previous generation of Google Analytics for measuring website traffic. If you set up Google Analytics for your website prior to October 14, 2020, you probably created a Universal Analytics property.
GA4 – Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 (formerly known as “App + Web) is a new kind of property, with different reports than what you’re used to seeing in Universal Analytics properties. One advantage of a Google Analytics 4 property is that you can use it for a website, an app, or both a website and app together. Universal Analytics properties only support websites.
GSC – Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.
Search Console offers tools and reports for the following actions:
- Confirm that Google can find and crawl your site.
- Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
- View Google Search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google Search, which search queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more.
- Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site.
- Show you which sites link to your website.
- Troubleshoot issues for AMP, mobile usability, and other Search features.
GTM – Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is a tag management system (TMS) that allows you to quickly and easily update measurement codes and related code fragments collectively known as tags on your website or mobile app. Once the small segment of Tag Manager code has been added to your project, you can safely and easily deploy analytics and measurement tag configurations from a web-based user interface.
When Tag Manager is installed, your website or app will be able to communicate with the Tag Manager servers. You can then use Tag Manager’s web-based user interface to set up tags, establish triggers that cause your tag to fire when certain events occur, and create variables that can be used to simplify and automate your tag configurations.
A collection of tags, triggers, variables, and related configurations installed on a given website or mobile app is called a container. A Tag Manager container can replace all other manually-coded tags on a site or app, including tags from Google Ads, Google Analytics, Floodlight, and 3rd party tags.
SEO Best Practice
Install Google Tag Manager
Install Google Analytics 4 with Google Tag Manager
- Create a new GA4 property
- Create a data stream (in this blog post, I focused on the Web stream)
- Copy the Measurement ID
- Create a Google Analytics 4 Configuration tag
- Paste the Measurement ID and set the tag to fire on All Pages
- Preview/test the new tag
- Publish the changes in Google Tag Manager
Deploy Universal Analytics with Tag Manager
Add your website to Google Search Console
To verify ownership using Google Tag Manager
- Choose Google Tag Manager in the verification details page for your site, and follow the instructions shown.
- You must have Publish permission for the Google Tag Manager container on the page.
- Place the
<noscript>portion of the Tag Manager code immediately after the opening<body>tag of your page. If you do not, verification will fail. - You cannot insert a data layer (or anything other than HTML comments) between the
<body>tag and the Tag Manager code. If you do, verification will fail. - Use the code exactly as provided; do no modify it. If you modify it, verification will fail.
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